Carolyn Kizer

Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a biologist and professor. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1945, Kizer pursued graduate study at Columbia and the University of Washington. From 1959 to 1965, she was editor of Poetry Northwest (which she founded in 1959 in Seattle), and spent 1964 and 1965 as a State Department specialist in Pakistan, where she taught at a women's college and translated poems from Urdu into English. She chose to leave early after the U.S. decision to bomb North Vietnam in 1965.

Later, she joined archaeological tours in Afghanistan and Iran. She has worked as director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., has taught at several universities, and was poet-in-residence at the University of North Carolina and Ohio University.

Her volumes of poetry include Yin (1984), which won a Pulitzer Prize the following year, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984), The Nearness of You (1986), and Harping On: Poems 1985-1995. She has also published a collection of essays, Proses: On Poems and Poets (1993), and edited 100 Great Poems by Women: A Golden Ecco Anthology (1995).

Author biography from the UI Pulitzer Prize Winners' webpage

Faculty |Iowa Writers' Workshop
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